Password Expiration Update

LCC
Students, Faculty and Staff

On Wednesday, April
29 several thousand system user passwords expired. This event
was not planned or expected. On behalf of the LCC ITS
Division, I would like to apologize to all for the confusion and
disruption this event created. We are very aware of the
Collegeâ€™s academic calendar and will never intentionally schedule a
system implementation or upgrade during critical times such as the
beginning or end of a semester or during course registration.

We have conducted an
investigation into the cause of the password expiration event and
believe the following occurred. During late October 2008, ITS
began the process of loading information for over 100,000 user
accounts into the new Identity Management System. This system
will require that passwords be reset every six months; which is
considered to be a best-in-class approach to securing technology
user accounts. During the load process the password expiration
dates were initially set. Just prior to going live with the
system this past January, a password synchronization process was run
to capture any password changes that had been made since the
accounts were loaded. We believed that this process would also
reset the expiration date to a new date six months into the future,
giving us the time needed to prepare communications and procedures
to guide the campus community through the password change process.
Unfortunately and unknown to us, the expiration dates were not
reset. As a result, six months after the load process started
last October, passwords began to expire.

What this means is
that passwords will continue to expire for additional user accounts
over the next several weeks as the six month point since they were
loaded is reached. Now that we know what happened, ITS will
try to develop, test and implement a process to reset the password
expiration dates, for those accounts not already reset, to a date
several months into the future in order to stop further passwords
from expiring. This must be done carefully so that we do not
make a bad situation worse. In the meantime, please consider
following the â€œaccount claimingâ€ process to reset your password in
order to avoid its expiration. This process can be initiated
from the Star Port login page â€œClaim my accountâ€ link. If you
have any questions or experience any problems with this process,
please contact the LCC Help Desk at
lcc1@lcc.edu or
517-483-5221.